Devastating Assessment of FARMS Legacy

[_Kishkumen]

No chance that you could get together, go Hellenic, and rough out a few plain and precious fragments (recovered from the sands of Egypt) of Aristophanes' lost comedy 'The Apologists'?

Imagine the possibilities for the chorus ... And if you could get Schryver into it, how he would enjoy running round the stage whacking his opponents with his long floppy ... well, conventional comedic appendage.

Now THAT would be hilarious.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
The "problem" of LDS apologetics will not be solved effectively until the Brethren either speak plainly for themselves
...

I hope you stick around -- to tell us more about the inner
workings of the great university at Provo.

As for The Brethren, even if they do not speak the express
mind and will of The Almighty, it might be productive for them
to speak up just a little more.

I'm not referencing conference talks and exclusive firesides,
but rather good old public relations -- where a fellow speaks
as a prophet when he is a prophet and as a man, if there are
times he is not professing to be the oracle of the Most High.

When is the last time that we non-LDS heard something
informative and insightful from the "Fifteen" in SLC?

Apologetics may be aimed at the faithful, but it keeps one
clear eye trained upon critical outsiders -- or, it should. A
dozen decades ago General Authorities like Joseph F. Smith
published refutations of Gentile criticism, without any need
for lower level helpers, voicing the precepts of men.

I'd welcome seeing some of the current apostles address topics
such as the age of the earth and the distribution of human DNA
across the face of the planet. Oaks and Holland possess some
credentials as scholars -- probably others among that elite
group have the ability to compose a half-way decent discourse.

Where is the modern Orson Pratt, with his Seer, or a
contemporary Orson Hyde, with his Frontier Guardian?

I suppose we "outsiders" will never again hear the latter day
apostolic voices articulated as in those forgotten pages.

Too bad about that.

UD

[_Cicero]

No chance that you could get together, go Hellenic, and rough out a few plain and precious fragments (recovered from the sands of Egypt) of Aristophanes' lost comedy 'The Apologists'?

Imagine the possibilities for the chorus ... And if you could get Schryver into it, how he would enjoy running round the stage whacking his opponents with his long floppy ... well, conventional comedic appendage.

Oh man, can you imagine? Aristophanes would have a field day with that crowd.

[_Hermes]

I am a product of the BYU Classics department, which treated me very well. I even shared a few classes with Ms. Jack, who was ahead of me. Looking back on my experience, it seems now that I was at once ridiculously naïve and incredibly lucky.

[_Kishkumen]

I am a product of the BYU Classics department, which treated me very well. I even shared a few classes with Ms. Jack, who was ahead of me. Looking back on my experience, it seems now that I was at once ridiculously naïve and incredibly lucky.

Well, welcome! I was before MsJack's time, probably working on my MA in Comp. Lit. at BYU when she was in the program. I forget honestly. She and I both took courses with Eric Huntsman at different times. I also had Macfarlane, Duckwitz, Hall, and others.

[_Cicero]

I am a product of the BYU Classics department, which treated me very well. I even shared a few classes with Ms. Jack, who was ahead of me. Looking back on my experience, it seems now that I was at once ridiculously naïve and incredibly lucky.

Well, welcome! I was before MsJack's time, probably working on my MA in Comp. Lit. at BYU when she was in the program. I forget honestly. She and I both took courses with Eric Huntsman at different times. I also had Macfarlane, Duckwitz, Hall, and others.

I took Greek history from Huntsman. I loved that class. Funny story is that I dropped a Bill Hamblin class on ANE to take it. Hamblin showed up the first day and announced that his goal for the first day was to get at least half of us to drop the class. He then proceeded to tell us how he was a ridiculously hard grader who would bury us in mounds of paper to read. He then expressed disappointment that no one was getting up to leave. What kind of teacher is that? I am very glad I dropped the class. It was too late to switch majors at that point but the classics have remained a big hobby of mine ever since.

[_Garbo]

I took Greek history from Huntsman. I loved that class. Funny story is that I dropped a Bill Hamblin class on ANE to take it. Hamblin showed up the first day and announced that his goal for the first day was to get at least half of us to drop the class. He then proceeded to tell us how he was a ridiculously hard grader who would bury us in mounds of paper to read. He then expressed disappointment that no one was getting up to leave. What kind of teacher is that? I am very glad I dropped the class. It was too late to switch majors at that point but the classics have remained a big hobby of mine ever since.

I have known several professors like that. Assholes, one and all. They all either have a Messiah complex or narcissistic personality disorder, or both.

[_Blixa]

I am a product of the BYU Classics department, which treated me very well. I even shared a few classes with Ms. Jack, who was ahead of me. Looking back on my experience, it seems now that I was at once ridiculously naïve and incredibly lucky.

Well, welcome! I was before MsJack's time, probably working on my MA in Comp. Lit. at BYU when she was in the program. I forget honestly. She and I both took courses with Eric Huntsman at different times. I also had Macfarlane, Duckwitz, Hall, and others.

*Latin love*

I've recently been reading Marilynne Robinson's book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books. I think she is one of the best living prose stylists writing in English (her first novel, Housekeeping, is breath-taking on a sentence by sentence level). I found her remarks on her literary background most elucidating (please forgive such a long quotation, but I think it is necessary for the arrival of Cicero at the end of it):

I went to college in New England and I have lived in Massachusetts for twenty years, and I find that the hardest work in the world--it may be in fact impossible--is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. On learning that I am from Idaho, people have not infrequently asked, "Then how were you able to write a book?"

Once or twice, when I felt cynical or lazy, I have replied, "I went to Brown," thinking that might appease them---only to be asked, "How did you manage to get into Brown?" One woman, on learning of my origins, said, "But there has to be talent in the family somewhere."

In a way Housekeeping is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood. It was my intention to make only those allusions that would have been available to my narrator, Ruth, if she were me at her age, more or less. The classical allusion, Carthage sown with salt and the sowing of dragon's teeth which sprouted into armed men, stories Ruthie combines, were both in the Latin textbook we used at Coeur d'Alene High School. My brother David brought home the fact that God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. I never thought to ask him where he found it. Emily Dickinson and the Bible were blessedly unavoidable.

There are not many references in Housekeeping to sources other than these few, though it is a very allusive book, because the narrator deploys every resource she has to try to make the world comprehensible. What she knows she uses, as she does her eyes and her hands. She appropriates the ruin of Carthage for the purposes of her own speculation. I thought the lore my teachers urged on me must have some such use.

....

As an aspect of my own intellectual life as a bookish child in the far West I was given odds and ends---Dido pining on her flaming couch, Lewis and Clark mapping the wilderness--without one being set apart from the other as especially likely to impress or satisfy anyone. We were simply given these things with the assurance that they were valuable and important in no specific way. I imagine a pearl diver finding a piece of statuary under the Mediterranean, a figure immune to the crush of depth though up to its waist in sand and blue with cold, in tatters of seaweed, its eyes blank with astonishment, its lips parted to make a sound in some lost dialect, its hand lifted to a city long since lost beyond indifference.

The diver might feel pity at finding so human a thing in so cold a place. It might be his privilege to react with a sharper recognition than anyone in the living world could do, though he had never heard the name of Phidias or Myron. The things we learned were in the same way, merely given for us to make what meaning we could've them.

This extended metaphor comes to you courtesy of Mrs. Bloomsburg, my high-school Latin teacher, who led five or six of us through Horace and Virgil and taught us patience with that strange contraption called the epic simile, which, to compare great things with small, appears fairly constantly in my own prose, modified for my own purposes. It was also Mrs. Bloomsburg who trudged us through Cicero's vast sentences, clause depending from clause, the whole cantilevered with subjunctives and weighted with culminating irony. It was all over our heads. We were bored but dogged. And at the end of it all, I think anyone can see that my style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.

[_Hermes]

Among the old guard still active, I had Huntsman, Macfarlane, and Lounsbury. I never had Peek or Duckwitz. Lounsbury and Macfarlane were my favorite teachers -- not that Huntsman was bad (his Book of Mormon class was a bright moment in the drudgery I put in to meet the religion requirement), but I liked them better. I also had Tueller and Tortorelli, both of whom have since moved on, and Hall, who is not teaching anymore.

[_Bob Loblaw]

Among the old guard still active, I had Huntsman, Macfarlane, and Lounsbury. I never had Peek or Duckwitz. Lounsbury and Macfarlane were my favorite teachers -- not that Huntsman was bad (his Book of Mormon class was a bright moment in the drudgery I put in to meet the religion requirement), but I liked them better. I also had Tueller and Tortorelli, both of whom have since moved on, and Hall, who is not teaching anymore.

I had Lounsbury. Damn, that was a long time ago.